Anaheim, California Computer Measurement Group Annual Conference, Dec. 3, 2001 — The Storage Performance Council (SPC) announces SPC-1, the first industry-standard benchmark for enterprise storage systems. The new benchmark, for the first time, gives customers a clearly applicable, vendor-neutral process to accurately compare and configure direct attach or network storage technology.
The SPC has constructed a complete multi-platform test kit for SPC-1 that quickly evaluates performance and price/performance using a variety of storage network topologies. SPC-1 is designed to:
To ensure authenticity, accuracy and compliance, the SPC requires completion of its result validation process — including audit certification and peer review — before results become official.
The SPC has formed strategic alliances with The Evaluator Group and Ideas International to be the standards organization's preferred analysts. This vendor-neutral evaluation and analysis paves the way for end-users, resellers and integrators to rapidly and confidently adopt SPC-1 as the standard for comparing and configuring storage solutions.
"Enterprise applications increasingly must be online 24-7 and be online with consistently satisfactory performance," said Chuck Standafer of the Evaluator Group. "In addition, with the advent of storage networks, configuring storage for the zero-latency enterprise requires industry-standard performance analysis tools and metrics."
"The storage market has long been wanting a standardized and audited industry benchmark. This benchmark is targeted to have broad market appeal for providers and consumers of storage networking technology. The storage benchmark SPC-1 is characterized predominantly as a random access environment for server-class computer systems and is modeled after the most ubiquitous applications in the market today — Web servers, database servers and email servers," said Ian Birks, chief operating officer of Ideas International.
"Customers have sought a workload environment that is widespread, metrics that are realistic and usable and an implementation that is representative of sophisticated I/O applications. SPC-1 provides them the powerful tools that they need," said Alan Cade, vice president of Technical Operations at Hitachi Data Systems.
The SPC is the only industry standards organization that defines and promotes storage benchmarks as well as disseminates objective, relevant and verifiable performance data and related test tools to the computer industry and its customers. Its members include Adaptec, Compaq, Dell, The Evaluator Group, Hitachi, IBM, Ideas International, LSI Logic Storage Systems, NEC, Sun MicroSystems, Unisys and VERITAS Software. The Storage Performance Council's strategic objectives are to empower storage vendors to build better products as well as to stimulate the IT community to more rapidly trust and deploy multi-vendor storage technology.
"The SPC offers customers further options to characterize performance in an open manner, providing alternatives to current benchmarking techniques," said Linda S. Sanford, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Storage Systems Group. "Working toward open standards benefits the industry and provides choice to our customers."
"Sun has supported open standards from the start and truly believes that the SPC has built an open, interoperable standard for the storage industry. Working together and putting aside our differences, we have ultimately given customers what they want — a high-quality, vendor-neutral benchmark for accurately comparing storage system technology," said Rhonda Holt, vice president of storage systems engineering for Sun Microsystems.
"The SPC's formation of industry-standard, cross-platform benchmarks allows storage vendors to be evaluated on equal terms against one another. This will be of immense value to resellers and IT end users, and Adaptec is pleased to be part of this effort," said Mark Delsman, chief technology officer at Adaptec. "While this is an important first step for the industry, we have also formed an SPC working group to develop additional benchmarks that will result in an entire suite of tools for measuring various classes and configurations of storage."
The SPC's first objective was to build a high-quality benchmark that would have the broadest possible appeal in the online enterprise storage market. A key future objective for the SPC is to build a benchmark primarily focused on sequential I/O processing that will represent applications such as backup/restore and video on demand. The SPC has also created a working group to begin the development of a benchmark suited for Network Attached Storage (NAS) subsystems. SPC's vision for the SPC Web site is to provide IT consumers and integrators the first database of audited and certified performance as well as price/performance results spanning manufacturers, configurations and products. This database will be the center of the storage industry.
"High performance servers running I/O intensive applications such as ERP, Exchange and online transaction processing now require very high performance at the storage system, and the pressure is expected to increase," said Flavio Santoni, vice president of sales and marketing at LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc. "The Storage Performance Council and SPC-1 will help customers ensure that the systems they buy will perform to their needs."
The SPC Steering Committee sets the global direction for the SPC. Members of the Steering Committee include:
Leah Schoeb (SPC Chairperson), Sun MicroSystems. Schoeb is an 11-year veteran of the computer industry, having provided performance analysis from database applications to SAN configurations. Schoeb has previously held performance-engineering positions at Fortune 500 companies such as Amdahl, Intel and Dell. Schoeb served on the Technical Advisory Board of the Transaction Processing Council for five years and was instrumental in founding the TPC-W workload. Schoeb holds an electrical engineering degree from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Mark Regester, LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc. Regester leads the Performance Analysis group, which is responsible for performance analysis of the company's disk array products, including the MetaStor® product line. Regester has been with LSI Logic Storage Systems for 17 years, the last nine years focused on performance and competitive analysis. He holds a degree in data processing and analysis from the University of Texas.
Brian Smith, IBM Corporation. Smith has more than 25 years of experience in IO system performance and extensive experience in IO benchmarking, computer performance evaluation and competitive analysis. Smith is the manager of Application IO Performance with IBM Corporation in San Jose, California. Smith earned a doctorate in mathematics from Florida State University and has co-authored a textbook on computer principles of modeling and simulation.
Mel Boksenbaum, Hitachi Data Systems. Boksenbaum is the director of the Hitachi Data Systems Performance Management Group, which develops guidelines to assist customers in achieving optimum performance in their workload environments, including storage area networks, network attached storage and database systems. Boksenbaum has served as president and director of the International Computer Measurement Group Inc. He earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Roger Reich, VERITAS Software Corporation. Reich is a 22-year veteran of the computer data storage industry, having shipped numerous products, from disk drives to database systems. Reich has held engineering and marketing positions at Digital, Maxtor and Compaq and now is a senior technical director at VERITAS. Reich is one of the founders of the Transaction Processing Performance Council, the founder of the Storage Performance Council, and a recent vice-chairman of the Storage Networking Industry Association. He earned an engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage system benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable performance data to the computer industry and its customers. SPC membership is open to all companies, academic institutions and individuals.
For more information, call 650.556.9384 or visit www.storageperformance.org.
Editor's Note: The complete SPC Press Kit, including SPC and SPC-1 backgrounders, biographies, executive summary and SPC and SPC-1 logos, is available at www.storageperformance.org and upon request.
SPC Benchmark-1 is a trademark of the Storage Performance Council.
MetaStor is a registered trademark of LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc.
Committed to helping customers exploit the value of information technology for success in the Internet economy, Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), is a leading provider of business solutions for the world's most information-intensive corporations. For further information on Hitachi Data Systems, access www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd., headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1999 (ended March 31, 2000) consolidated sales of 8,001 billion yen ($75.5 billion). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd., please visit Hitachi's Web site at www.hitachi.co.jp.
¹ At an exchange rate of 106 yen to the dollar.
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